3 February 2014. A World to Win News Service. Never have the events in the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and their lessons been more relevant than they are today. In that year an enormous, prolonged mass upsurge led to the overthrow of the Iranian monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime was a cornerstone of U.S. domination in the Middle East. But in 1981, the ecstasy of the revolutionary period gave way to a counter-revolutionary coup led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

This new regime was not able to consolidate its hold on the country all at once. After a period in which it was able to repress the mass movement and spread demoralization, revolutionary ferment aimed against Islamic rule began to come to a boil again in the winter of 1981. In the summer of 1982, the Union of Communists of Iran, the predecessor to today’s Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), began preparing for an armed insurrection, which took place in January 1982 in the northern city of Amol.

A small body of armed men and women revolutionaries who called themselves Sarbedaran were able to seize the city, to the joy of an increasing number of ordinary masses. The regime was forced to deploy ground and air forces from all over the country. It retook the city after several days of fighting. The attempt to hunt down people who had helped plan the uprising or who had come to its aid went on for a long time afterwards. Later in that decade the regime executed tens of thousands of communists and revolutionaries and plunged the country into a long period of darkness. The communist-led revolution failed, but it represented the only way out, and Iranian communists are determined that its lessons lead to a successful revolution.

The following statement entitled “History has proven who are the real imperialist lackeys” was issued on the occasion of the 32nd anniversary of the Amol uprising by the CPI(MLM).

About 30 years ago, comrade Behrooz Fathi – a leader of the Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran) and one of the Amol insurrectionists – while under arrest and savage torture by the Islamic rulers – shot back at his interrogators who accused the Union of Communists of Iran and the armed insurrection of Sarbedaran in Amol of being an “American” project: “History will prove who are the real imperialist lackeys!”

For the revolutionary communists who had organized and led the Sarbedaran insurrection, it was clear that the “anti-imperialism” of the Islamic reactionary ruling regime in Iran was nothing but the imposition of a more horrendous version of the same system of oppression and exploitation that existed under the Shah, while adding to it religious obscurantism and religious tyranny.

Over the last 34 years the Islamic Republic of Iran has proven that its rulers never ventured outside the capitalist-imperialist system. The IRI’s ideological roots and social programme go back as far as 1,400 years in history, but nevertheless this regime brought the totality of economic life of Iran into the world network of the capitalist-imperialist system even more fully than the Shah. By carrying out super-exploitation of the lives of more than 70 million people, this regime has delivered unimaginable wealth to the imperialist system. While trumpeting its “anti imperialism” it has been tightening its links with the world system and today it has prepared to enter into unity and solidarity with the imperialist powers more openly in order to maintain its lifeline which is dependent on the world capitalist system.

Indeed history has proven who are the real lackeys of imperialism!

The Islamic Republic’s “anti-imperialism” was on the one hand a bargaining process with the imperialist powers in order to consolidate the position of the Islamist strata of the comprador-feudal class of Iran and on the other hand its aim was to impose outmoded Islamic ideology, morality, culture and values in opposition to the equally outmoded ideology and values that the Shah’s regime had imposed on the society with the help of the imperialists. This opposition was thoroughly and totally reactionary, and the rule of the theocratic regime in Iran, a regime which has mixed state and religion, has been among the main sources of unprecedented degeneration and backwardness in the social relations among the people, including the intensification of the oppression of women and the spread of old culture and values, ignorance and superstition by leaps and bounds.

The Islamic Republic inaugurated its system with a crackdown on a rising of women against imposition of Islamic morality and traditions; with the suppression of the just struggles of the oppressed nations in Khuzestan, Kurdistan and Turkmen-Sahara; by attacking freedom of thought and artistic creation and the revolutionary movements of the workers and toiling masses of Iran; and it consolidated its regime with the massacre of the enlightened vanguards of the people whom it had captured – the political prisoners. It was against this regime that the Union of Communists of Iran called upon the people in 1981 to rise up and join the insurrection. The October 1981 statement of Sarbedaran called:

“Oh People of Iran! … The Islamic Republic, Khomeini and his cohorts, are nothing but an ensemble of clerical filth, tyranny and bullying. The fraudulent Khomeini has restored the despotic monarchy in its religious version and upon the tortured and mutilated bodies of our young revolutionaries. The regime of the whip and the gallows of Khomeini and company sheds the blood of hundreds of youth and teens, men and women and even the children of our people every day. The sounds of the gunning down of people in the Islamic Republic’s countless prisons and detention centres are often and all over…

“The monstrosity and crimes of Khomeini and his band have made the whole nation mournful and pushed the country towards complete decadence and collapse. The regime of ignorance, arrogance and back-biting of this swindler old fox has brought stagnation and destruction to industry, agriculture, science and national culture and destroyed individual and social security and well-being in our country…

“Oh worker comrades! Toiling brothers and sisters of every city and the countryside!… Let us stand up with one heart and united! Fear not the hollow browbeating and empty artillery and gunfire of this bunch of wicked hoodlums. We must burn down throne and courts of this rude bunch that have in their brainless heads a dream of monarchical rule.”

The defeat of the Sarbedaran insurrection and revolutionary struggles in other parts of the country, especially in Kurdistan, meant consolidation of the Islamic regime. Despite the 32 years that have passed since the defeat of the Sarbedaran insurrection, its memory, lessons and historical call still resonates. This means that the only road to liberation is through the overthrow of the Islamic Republic system in its totality and the establishment of a radically different and new political power and state – a state that not only does not belong to the capitalist class and its servants and is not based on any of the ideological-cultural institutions, values and traditions of this class, but aims to uproot all this and has a completely opposite class character to the ruling reaction. The name of this state is the dictatorship of the proletariat and it aims to rely on the conscious masses of people and annihilate and uproot all forms of oppression, discrimination, exploitation, ignorance and suppression.

Thirty-two years after the Sarbedaran insurrection, the necessity of a revolutionary movement for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the establishment of a proletarian state continues – a challenge before the society, especially its communist forces. That lesson is that without seizing political power, all is illusion, and that seizing political power is impossible without the leadership of a revolutionary communist party with a correct political and ideological line.

The lessons of the defeat of the revolution of 1979 as well as the Sarbedaran insurrection clearly demonstrate that without the intervention of the revolutionary communist forces, forces with a revolutionary vision and programme, there will never be a change in the situation that will bring the emancipation of the people, and the situation of society will go from bad to worse. If we, the revolutionary communists, fail to play our role in the intense and increasing crisis in this society and in the world, again and again the reactionary forces of one kind or another will occupy the scene and become the main players.

In order to carry out this urgent historic task today, more than ever we need a solid core of revolutionary communists equipped with the highest achievements and levels of understanding of the international communist movement, who can become, in Iran as well as the region, the principal players on the political stage.

In the 1980s a just war for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic was initiated by Sarbedaran, which represented the interests of the majority of the people of Iran against the reactionaries – capitalism-imperialism and Islamism. The realization of those goals and political tasks continues to be the only way for the emancipation of the majority of the people of this society. That emancipation depends on the forces that have a new understanding and awareness of the liberatory character of the future society and are preparing the revolution – a revolution of the kind of the socialist revolutions of the 20th century in Russia and China but at the same time very different from them and unprecedented in the human history.

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.